The Fierce confrontation between an author and a journal editor. - ChaseDream

hd an exchange between an author and a journal editor regarding the author's revision of an article submitted for publication. First, the author's letter accompanying the revision.

To: Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed please find our latest version of MS #85-02-22-RRRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-re-re-revised version of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the damned running head. Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the reviews. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some sort of demented glee in the sadistic, imbecilic, and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was particularly hostile, and we request that you not ask her or him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to her/him the review process may be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we could do nothing about. For example, if (as reviewer C suggested), several of my ancestry were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and so we once again hope that the paper is now more acceptable to you and your minions. You suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to do this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before composing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works the he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions by other reviewers.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are a silly, silly person with no shred of scholarly sense. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of you scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of our reviewers sends to your journal. We would be particularly keen to review a piece by Reviewer C.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked this paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,

Author, MS #00-0022-RRRRRR

To: Authors, MS #85-02-22-RRRRRR

From: Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my decision letter concerning the above-referenced piece of excrement.

I have asked several experts who specialize in the area of research in which you dabble to have a look at your pathetic little submission, and their reviews are enclosed. I shall not waste my LaserJet ink reiterating the details of their reviews, but please allow me to highlight some of the more urgent points of contention they raise:

Reviewer A has asked me to inform you that, as his suggestions were not mentioned in my previous decision letter, he resents you calling him sadistic and imbecilic. He has no quarrell with arbitrarily tyrannical.
Reviewer B suggests that you cite his work EXCLUSIVELY in the introduction. He has asked me to remind you that he spells his name with a final "e" (i.e., Scumbage), not as you have referenced him in the last version.
Reviewer C indicates that the discussion can be shortened by at least 5 pages. Given the fact that the present Discussion is only three pages long, I am not certain how to advise you. Perhaps you might consider eliminating all speculation and original ideas.
Reviewer D has asked that you consider adding her as a coauthor. Although she has not directly contributed to the manuscript, she has made numerous comments that have, in her view, significantly improved the paper. Specifically, she believes that her suggestions concerning the reorganization of the acknowledgments paragraph were especially important. Please note that she spells her name with an em-dash, and not with the customary hyphen.
My own reading of the manuscript indicates that the following problems remain:
- By "running head," we do not mean a picture of your son's face with legs attached. Please provide a four- or five-word title for the paper that summarizes the report's most important point. May I suggest, "Much Ado About Nothing"?
- Please make certain that you have adhered to APA stylebook guidelines for publication format. Please direct your attention to the section entitled, "Proper Format for an Insignificant Paper" (2001, p. 46).
- Please submit any revision of the paper on plain, blank stationery. Submitting the article on Stanford letterhead will not increase your chances of having the article accepted for publication.
- Please doublecheck the manuscript for spelling and grammatical errors. Our experience at the Archives is that "cycle-logical" slips through most spellcheck programs undetected.
- Although I am not an expert in quantitative methodology, it is my understanding that the "F" in F-test does not stand for "f___ing". Please conduct a word search and correct the manuscript accordingly.

Yours sincerely,

Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

p.s. - If your original submission had been as articulate as your most recent letter, we might have avoided this interchange. It is too bad that tenure and promotion committees at your university do not have access to authors' correspondence with editors, for it is clear that you would be promoted on the basis of your wit alone. Unfortunately, it's the publications that count, and I'm sorry to say that JEdP is not prepared to accept this revision. We would be perfectly ambivalent about receiving a seventh revision from you.